Writer Karin Slaughter has always been drawn to crime

Best-selling author Karin Slaughter returns to her Will Trent series with “The Kept Woman” (William Morrow, 461 pages, $27.99), the eighth novel in that series.

In the book, Trent, an agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, and GBI medical examiner Sara Linton are on the trail of whoever killed a former police officer and abducted a woman. Their case is further complicated by the fact that the crime scene belongs to the most powerful person in town, and that skeletons from Trent’s closet surface with a connection to the case.

Slaughter’s novels are all set in Georgia, where she’s from and still lives, and she has established a strong sense of place in the books, so much so that her fictional Grant County practically has a role of its own. Slaughter, who will appear in Wichita on Wednesday, said in a recent phone interview that real people, places and experiences do seep into the stories, as amalgamations, but that the setting is “my version of the world.”

“Everyone’s Atlanta is different,” she said. “As an author, you try to catch the flavor of it and speak from your own perspective. If you’re an author who understands how important a sense of place is, you can effectively paint a portrait” without hitting readers over the head with overlong descriptions or details that bog the story down.

All of her novels are crime-related, either focusing on law enforcement investigations (the Will Trent and Grant County series) or falling into the psychological-thriller category (stand-alone novels such as “Pretty Girls”). Slaughter said she’s always been drawn to the crime genre.

“Books that I loved as a kid, that I grew up reading, were thrillers and mysteries,” Slaughter said, naming authors such as Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky. ”So many really great women were writing (crime) when I came up. Earlier it was just men, and women have a different take on things happening to women. I saw how important it is for women’s voices to be in the genre.”

Slaughter said that early in her career, “people would say I write like a man, but I was like, no, I write like a woman – I am a woman and this is what I write.”

One thing Slaughter said is important to her in writing crime is to “play fair” with the plot. “I hate when I get to the end of a thriller and the bad guy just came in the last 30 pages,” she said, “and I think, I figured this out when the author did.” She said she wants her readers to have a reaction like solving a puzzle instead of a what-the-heck one.

“I don’t want my motivation for the bad guys to be ‘because they’re bad’ but to have an explanation,” she said. “It’s dangerous to paint someone who breaks the social contract as an ‘other’ – they are us, but with different experiences.” She said she finds it much more interesting to explore context of badness: what makes someone break the social contract?

And plenty of social contracts get broken: murders, assaults, betrayals and corruption are the foundation of crime fiction and tie into Slaughter’s realistic, gritty plotlines. “As a woman,” she said, “I get painted with that ‘graphic’ brush where a man wouldn’t. But women read these books – and women write them.”

“We know what our fear triggers are,” Slaughter said, and so women can write about crime in a visceral, harrowing way. Because women “look at the world from a different perspective, being less strong than men, raised to be conscious of our surroundings in a different way, we bring that to our books.”

That’s one of the reasons Slaughter looks at crime fiction and especially crime shows on TV with a far more critical eye. She said she’s particularly annoyed when a show has “a smart woman doing something stupid so the man can be the hero.”

The women in her books aren’t just victims or plot points: they’re strong professionals, survivors, multifaceted characters with histories and flaws and complexity. And so by not sanitizing or backing away from all the violence that women face, she said, “I feel like I’m doing something important for women.”

This story was originally published September 16, 2016 at 1:29 PM with the headline "Writer Karin Slaughter has always been drawn to crime."